Who other than Barthes would have said the following about the novelistic?…the novelistic is neither the false nor the sentimental; it is merely the circulatory space of subtle, flexible desires; within the very artifice of a “sociality” whose opacity is miraculously reduced, it is the web of amorous relations (“To the Seminar,” an excellent text).
That is, who would have said “‘sociality’ whose opacity is miraculously reduced?” This is a way of conveying that what Lukács calls the “world of convention” (Theory of the Novel) in the novel is porous, indeed “circulatory,” “flexible.” But this is inverted unexpectedly and shown in terms of its thickness, its opacity, which is accordingly “reduced.” Barthes can not only effortlessly accomplish such an inversion: he can make it stick (like the referent, like the “real”) by getting it right, by saying the consistent thing, what accords, what would seemingly succeed or follow. This is what I was getting at in talking about activity and its tendency to frustrate the paradigmatic (to “outplay” it, as Barthes says in The Neutral), by tending to be more dynamic, more syntagmatic: activity is la succession réglée d'un certain nombre d'opérations. To put it bluntly, Barthes’s use of metaphor here (and nearly everywhere else) tends to be more metonymic than we might expect (though it is not reducible to this second, opposing, paradigmatic or metaphorical term). One can wonder, however (and Barthes himself wondered this), just how long this succession can go on.
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